This blog is going through a phase as commonplace book for collecting all the different ways that people try to write about what love is. Here is Thomas Dixon, author of a great book called The Invention of Altruism and director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, London, talking about some themes that came out of a recent conference at his Centre:
In all of this, two themes that are close to my own heart emerged: the need to pay close attention to the language and categories of historical actors (which was emphasised by Laura Doan and others); and the importance of understanding theological and devotional terms and genres when trying to comprehend the lives of Victorian and post-Victorian subjects. Angharad Eyre’s analysis of the place of love, emotion, and tears in the literatures of evangelical conversion, and Sue Morgan’s account of Maud Royden’s 1921 book Sex and Common Sense, her campaigns against ‘anti-somatic theology’, and her own unusual love life, both illustrated the complex but reinforcing relationships between theological and secular forms of love.
In thinking about the meaning of ‘love’, and how love has been made and remade in the past, the historian needs to keep all these complexities in mind. And my parting thought from the conference this week, as an historian of emotions, was that ‘love’ is not best thought of as an emotion at all. Perhaps Saint Augustine’s approach is better: to think of ‘love’ as an almost unknowable, underlying substance, out of which particular passions, feelings, emotions and experiences might arise….
Love is made in many ways, all of them at some level linguistic. The historian needs to listen carefully to the languages and dialects of the heart, through which love is called forth, expressed, made, and reinterpreted. Writing in her autobiography towards the end of her life, in her late seventies, Constance Maynard wrote that she supposed that psychoanalysts would say of her feelings that they revealed as ‘thwarted sex instinct’. Maynard rejected this language, preferring to write of the ‘hunger’ she had felt, which needed satisfying. That was clearly a spiritual need – a hungering and thirsting after righteousness – as much as a psychological one. To the end she feared that her great fault had been to prefer human to heavenly love.
This idea of listening as the guiding methodology of the history of the emotions is something I’m very interested in right now. In an essay I wrote for my supervisor this week, I discussed a move in the history of emotions away from structuralist frameworks shaped by anthropology or a version of psychoanalysis that envisions civilisation as the Oedipal family, and towards more multivalent analysis in which—or so I think—psychoanalysis endures not in translating regression and repression onto the social level, but in envisioning the relationship between historian and sources as an analytic one, in which listening both to the spoken and the unspoken and being alive to the possibilities of the transference are central. Joan Scott has an article in the last but one issue of History and Theory, called ‘The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History’, in which she writes along these lines, citing theorists like Michel de Certeau and historians like Lyndal Roper who are particularly skilled at using psychoanalysis to ‘recognize one’s complicated connection to… others’. It’s this I want to keep in mind today as I go back to the archives and my work on Arthur Sidgwick’s diaries, but also as I negotiate relations among people living as well as long-dead.
A little over one year ago, it was a late night in New Jersey, and a friend and I sat facing each other in the window seat of that beautiful big room on Holder quad where I spent my senior year. A little over one year ago, I was still waiting to hear whether I would be awarded the funding that would allow me to return to Britain for graduate school, and my friend and I were weighing my postgraduate options. There was a lull in the conversation, and silence had fallen, but then my friend spoke up.
“I don’t think you should go to Oxford,” he said. “It is a repressive place.”
My friend knows his psychoanalytic theory better than I do, and for many months I dwelt upon his declaration. True, for those fin-de-siècle types who are inclined to think that sexuality is perverted unless it is directed toward the copulative, Oxford is bound to look rather strange and cold. For centuries its begowned inhabitants lived a monastic existence within their quads and cloisters; they read and they prayed and their procreation was not sexual so much as intellectual, the particular form of sublimated eros that by the time of the period I study hovered somewhere in the background of the tutorial system. In Oxford—I told my friend many months later, in a different late-night conversation on the other side of the world, after thinking long and hard upon his declaration—life does not run on a hookup culture, or the rumor of one, the way American universities seem to do, but the stone walls and certainly those rather phallic dreaming spires seem fairly to hum with a certain erotic energy. If there is repression, it is not pointlessly so, for the more you know about the history of this place (particularly in my period, when the erotics of intellect were foremost in many dons’ and students’ minds), the more you can pick up a certain residue of all that sublimation when you participate in an Oxford evensong or hunker down in the reading room or follow the path down to the far end of Christ Church Meadow and see a perfect line of aspirational spires looking hopefully upwards in search of something greater than themselves and the work of the colleges to which they belong.
In literature and history, so much of Oxford eros is not about coition, but rather what “eros” really meant, philosophically, to people like Plato or the lyric poets. Symonds, knowing whereof he spoke, defined eros in terms of ὄρεξις: yearning or longing or, in the words of Liddell and Scott, “appetency” and “conation”: the state of longing for or desiring on the one hand, and of attempt and endeavor on the other. So would the medieval poets have told Oxonian scholars past that love is not true love if it is requited; so is modern Oxford Anglicanism about doubt and searching and tracing the lines of St. Mary-the-Virgin or Christ Church Cathedral’s spires up into the grey sky, but never quite expecting to hear anything back. So do we talk about the things we spend our lives studying as labors of love undertaken for their own sakes, undertaken because we have given something of our souls to their fruition.
Indeed, coming back to Oxford now with a comparative sense of having lived here and in other universities, so much about the intensity of living in Oxford, and particularly of that orexetic quality to it, seems to fall into place. Even as a beaten-down graduate student who seems to spend an awful lot of time running from one end of town to the other in the rain, wrestling with the all-too-twentieth-century bureaucracy of the History Faculty, or making jokes about classical reception over coffee in the MCR, it’s not so difficult, once you come to know this place, to understand why it was here that Pater wrote about burning always with a hard, gem-like flame, or even why Symonds, at Oxford in the same years, wrote that “theology penetrated [emphasis mine] our intellectual and social atmosphere,” particularly in those contexts where “young men and their elders met together.” The history of a university whose primary fields of study were for most of its history theology and classics naturally mingled to inseparability Hellenic and Hebraic forms of love. In exchange for policing the sexual behavior of fellows and students alike (viz. marriage regulations, attempts to curb prostitution in the city, sodomy trials, blackmail scandals, and much much more), the curriculum and social atmosphere of the university provided two very rich intellectual traditions in which to conceive of intensely erotic attachments to people and to ideas, both in some wise about a yearning, power-imbalanced, and exceedingly place-specific love. There is a canon of Oxford orexis, and it’s not just Hopkins or Housman or Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited but also Matthew Arnold, whose poetic and prosaic descriptions of the city of dreaming spires are nothing if not erotic; and even Max Beerbohm, whose “Oxford love story” Zuleika Dobson gives us a highly heterosexual object of desire who is nevertheless inextricable from the erotics of this city.
I could go on and on. Jude the Obscure is about yearning—for knowledge, for a woman, for knowledge of a woman—while Tolkien and Lewis and latterly Philip Pullman give us quests of tonally different but no less potent kinds. When E.M. Forster wanted to include in Howards End a character whose love for alma mater is akin to love for brother or sister, husband or wife, he didn’t use his own university, Cambridge. Instead, for Tibby Schlegel, it is Oxford that is the “place, as well as a person” that “may catch the glow.” And there is a glow, though you’d have to come here to know it, because the way the late-afternoon sun that you can see from the Upper Reading room turns the spires of All Souls golden is something that does not happen anywhere else I’ve ever been.
My bedtime reading at the moment is Ian McEwan’s novel(la?) On Chesil Beach, which evokes an innocent yet intense, very Oxonian kind of romantic relationship. The book’s gender politics are not unproblematic—let’s just say that it’s perfectly obvious it was written by a man—yet I think McEwan gets something rather right about a kind of Oxford eros that starts with yearning to know and yearning to feel before it gets on to yearning to touch. Yearning to touch is the kind of yearning that we in the larger popular culture perhaps think of when we think of desire, and it is also perhaps that which we are keen to proscribe those whom we have diagnosed as “repressed.” Yet I shall never forget sitting in the History Graduate Study Room three floors underground and reading the New Yorker profile of Derek Parfit that said that, after years of living in rooms in All Souls and dining on high table like so many unattached scholars in this city who don’t have kitchens to come home to, he met a nice lady philosopher and rather matter-of-factly moved to North Oxford, like so many dons to get married before him. Now, this is what I mean when I say that Oxford is the home of lost causes: for repression is as repression does, but sometimes loneliness is really just assuaged by moving in with a lady philosopher at long last. This is true of all the universities in which I’ve ever lived, and many academic couples I have known—but Oxford is the only university I’ve called home that knows it and admits it and makes a house in North Oxford seem as richly satisfying a fantasy as anything generated by Manhattan or Los Angeles.
The hold that psychoanalytic method has had upon modern western thought and life is a powerful one, and I appreciate many things about how it’s taught us to think critically about who we are and what we want. It’s a shame that the academy has in most respects come to see it as a way of thinking that’s so inflexibly dogmatic that it has to be discarded as unproductive—but it’s a shame, too, that the imprint it has made upon the popular culture is one of inflexible dogmatism with respect to what eros is and what it can do. Psychoanalysis’s reception, particularly in the US, seems to have consisted largely of calcifying this sense that eros need be only and most importantly about sex, about corporeality. It’s only in this other world—where my friends study papyrology and civilized conversation is a virtue—that it also seems as if there are more routes to learning to feel and to desire than seemed possible when you spent your adolescence watching others fall in and out of love.
There are downsides to the pull of this place, and if you get stuck inside it for many years I think it is often possible to forget how to keep growing. Yet almost everything I have to this point learned about how to feel, about self-knowledge and adherence to it, about human experience beyond intellect and about things in Heaven and Earth not heretofore dreamt of in my philosophy, I have learned from this city. Foremost among them is that eros isn’t about knowing, it’s about wanting to know—and the latter is something I’ve always been able to do.
As a tourist in Greece, it requires a double take to realize that the country is in a bit of a mess. After all, even a functional Greece wouldn’t look as clean and shiny and new as France or Germany, the US or Canada. It’s never been as wealthy, as full of luxury goods. The large number of men in late middle age who apparently do nothing but sit in cafes and drink iced coffee can be chalked up to cultural differences, and in Athens homeless people don’t beg in the street on anything near to the scale of Paris, London, or any of the large US cities. But look again, picking yourself off the floor whither you’ve fallen in shock at the sight of the insanely cheap food prices (I’m still reeling at the memory of one particular shopping trip, on which I bought for two euros an assortment of fruit and veg that would easily have cost ten in Paris). Then you’ll see how many storefronts, in Athens and outlying towns, are boarded up and empty, how many supermarket shelves are thinly stocked, how many services are inexplicably missing. The trains haven’t run in over a year, for instance, and on the rare occasion that you find a post office that isn’t shut due to strikes or lack of money, you may discover, as I did, that it inexplicably sells neither envelopes nor stamps. When I travelled round the Peloponnese for a week with two friends, we not infrequently found ourselves the only diners in a restaurant, even at peak mealtimes in touristy areas; more than once, we suspected ourselves to be the only guests at our budget-to-midrange hotels. Even what the internet suggests to be one of the best restaurants in Athens, where we ate twice, wasn’t more than half-full on either occasion, while I can readily imagine that at its US equivalent you’d never be able to get a reservation. The strongest reminder of the economic crisis came in Selianítika, the little village on the Gulf of Corinth that for two weeks played host to fourteen Americans’ study of written and spoken ancient Greek: we arrived to discover that the village’s only ATM had been recently blown up by thieves desperate for the cash inside it. But you’d almost never have known it, so loudly did the beachfront bars blast American pop hits and so enthusiastically did large bathing-suit-clad Greeks sling back cheap beers and plunge into the salty water as a respite from the scorching midday heat. Greece right now is a strange country—but at least, as far as this traveller could figure out, there isn’t any reason not to give it your badly-needed business. The beach at Selianítika.
But what are the implications, then, for the tourist and would-be conversational Attic speaker? Well, as in so many other parts of elite academic life, it means cognitive dissonance. It takes exactly the same state of mind to walk past the Big Issue-seller on the way to the Bodleian as it does to settle, amidst economic crisis and large-scale unemployment, into a routine of climbing mountains in blazing 100-degree sun to view the ruins at the top, wandering through archaeological museums looking at Mycenaean pot-shard after Mycenaean pot-shard, and spending fourteen days in a fruit garden surrounded by a ragtag international collection of philhellenes, would-be opera singers, and the odd innocent holiday-maker, among whom (aside from we hapless English speakers) the lingua franca seemed to be German, with modern Greek, Italian, and even Latin thrown in. Just so have generations of young academics before me wound up their grand tours by traipsing round some ruins in the Peloponnese. Just so have centuries of Oxford reading parties blundered headlong into some rural area on the Continent in order to get to grips with Plato and Homer. Just so have they been met with strange Germans and Germanophiles intent on enthusiastic amateur cultural and artistic pursuits as combined with swimming and calisthenics. Just so have ancient adventures, philosophical quandaries, and the mysteries of the attraction of the relative pronoun come to seem more vivid and palpable than the daily lives of locals who pop up every once in a while to provide some essential service, speaking a modern language the philhellenes find impossible to understand. It isn’t pretty, and it’s certainly got the weight of cultural-imperialist history to it.The Hellenikon Idyllion, home of spoken Attic.
For that matter, everywhere I went in Greece, I found myself wading waist-deep through my own palimpsest. I thought of Schliemann and Byron, of course, revisited Cavafy, and read Symonds’ travel narrative about Athens. Atop the Acropolis, I thought of Freud’s “Disturbance of Memory” there in 1904; when a sudden downpour at Epidaurus sent my travelling companions and me running headlong for the archaeological museum, and we stood in sopping-wet silence in its main hall, dripping on the tile floor and looking at the remains of shrines to Aesclepius, I made a less-predictable connection (though perhaps one no less redolent with a sense of the uncanny!) to the eerie shots of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in the planetarium in Manhattan. Greece does funny things to the spirit. Some of them are wonderful: in the sculpture gallery in the Acropolis Museum, the conviction pierced me like a thunderbolt that it is utterly wrong for the British Museum to keep hold of the Elgin Marbles when they so obviously demand to be seen here, in their proper context—something that it is quite impossible to appreciate when you’ve only seen the ghostly parade make its way across the wall of the gallery in London. At the top of the hill at Delphi, looking down at the lean white columns half-restored out of the ruin of the Temple of Apollo, standing starkly erect against the backdrop of the lush green valley below, I could easily see why, when, in an apocryphal (albeit plausible) story related by one of our teachers, the great classicist Kenneth Dover beheld that same view, he felt himself moved to the point of literal orgasm. But at the same time, I can’t say that I was surprised that my struggles with reading and speaking ancient Greek left me exhausted in body, mind, and spirit, as easily overwhelmed by a variety of personal issues as by my efforts to keep up with Attic-immersion conversations about Plato’s concept of τέχνη. Disturbances of memory crowd upon one in a country where you can walk through the physical remnants of civilization from a thousand years before Homer; where recent history is fraught with all sorts of conflicts and questions of national identity that seem at once foreign and familiar, at once of a piece with the longer history and separate from it.On the Acropolis.
So, on the one hand (μὲν), Greece was wonderful, utterly unlike anywhere I’ve ever been, a rich learning experience. But on the other hand (δὲ), I spent a lot of it sad and confused—which I remain now, despite being back in the mind-clearing, noise-free world of my usual close of summer in rural Canada. Being somewhere so puzzlingly unheimlich heightened the sense that this has been a very difficult, unheimlich summer, spent floating back and forth across the western hemisphere with no fixed address or institutional affiliation, no motivation to make academic progress, and no shortage of personal conflicts through which to struggle. The contrast with a year ago—coming to Canada to piece together six weeks spent in English archives and to start writing my first chapter, before I fell headlong into the whirlwind of thesis year—is stark. It leaves me wondering if this deadened feeling of writer’s block that has resulted in an unproductive summer is travelling’s fault, or growing-up-and-graduating-college’s fault, or my own. It leaves me wondering how real academics manage the tendency of summertime to leave one at loose ends, and the tendency of real life and its accumulation of small troubles to intercede upon one’s ability to sit down and write. It leaves me wondering if real academics ever see their work the way that novelists and poets and visual artists see theirs: something that can be done as much by being thoughtful and reflective about one’s life as by sitting at the computer and banging out words, something that takes time and quiet and country walks and human relationships for it to percolate, something that can act as its own form of therapy, helping the writer to understand all that is most unheimlich about other times, other places, and herself in relation to them.The Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
I spend a lot of my academic life—one which, like many academic lives, observes no distinction between work and home, between the professional and the personal—thinking about how many other young women and men before me sat at desks scattered across the western hemisphere and weighed their life’s ambivalence in μὲν… δέ clauses, thereby managing to cope somehow with the (admittedly relatively softball) pitches life throws at them. Thus, on my last night in Greece, my program had a talent show of sorts, and I stood up in front of ragtag mix of American students and teachers, Greeks, and the odd German, and gave a performance at which I wasn’t particularly talented, but which meant the world to me. As I said to my audience, barely able to look them in the eye, I started wanting to learn what the classical tradition had to do with me, started realizing how deficient my education had been in this regard, and thus took up Greek, for a wide variety of reasons academic and personal. But all of them could be summed up synecdochically (there’s a nice Greek word!) by my desire to understand what has since become my favorite passage in the Greek corpus, Phaedrus 251-252. Almost eighteen months since I bought my first Greek textbook from the Turl Street Oxfam shop in the Easter vacation and one of the various Indo-European philologists who suddenly and coincidentally appeared in my life taught me to notice “Ο ΠΑΙΣ ΚΑΛΟΣ” (“the beautiful boy”) inscribed on the red-figure vases in the Ashmolean, almost a year since the start of the most intense nine months in two decades’ worth of schooling, I read my passage aloud to thirty or so philhellenes, in Greek and in my own English translation—and I could claim to understand every word of it, in heart and in mind.Statue of Antinous, one of the most famous τῶν παιδῶν κάλων, in the Delphi Archaeological Museum.
I append the relevant passage below. It’s a fitting note on which to close this summer, and one which, as I look out on the sun-dappled Pacific Ocean (to which no poet, so far as I know, has ascribed the darkness of wine), doesn’t make me feel so bad. Not so shabby for eighteen months of Greek. Not so shabby for twenty-two-and-a-half years of life.Rosy-fingered dawn over the wine-dark sea at Selianítika.
But the newly-initiated man, who has then seen much, whenever he sees a godlike face or bodily form that represents Beauty well, first thrills at the sight, and then some awe overcomes him. Beholding his beloved, he reveres him like a god. If he did not fear a reputation for excessive madness, he would sacrifice to his young beloved [παιδικοῖς], so as to worship him. And, seeing his beloved, he is so changed from the thrill that he is possessed by sweat and unwanted heat: for, when he accepts the flow of beauty into his eyes, it moistens the roots of the feathers; growing warm, these roots, which once had been closed through their hardness and prevented from growing, are melted. Having nourishment poured upon them, they become swollen and begin to bear forth from their roots the stems of feathers across the entire form of the soul, for all of it was feathered long ago. Then the whole soul seethes and throbs, just as, when growing teeth, one suffers pain around the gums. Just like this scratching and irritation in the gums, is the pain that the soul has when it begins to grow feathers: it seethes and throbs and tickles, as it produces them. Then when the soul regards a beautiful youth [παιδὸς κάλλος] and the thrilling feeling comes upon it, it receives this nourishing yearning. As it does so it is watered and warmed, ceases from its pain and is filled with joy. Yet when it is separated [from the beloved], the soul becomes dry and unkempt, dehydrating and closing up the buds of the feathers; and inside, having been shut up with the yearning, the feathers spring and throb, each one pricking the passage accorded it, so that the soul, having been stung all round, is caused to ache—until, once more recalling the memory of the beautiful one, it rejoices. And, out of the mixture of these two things, it is perplexed by the strangeness of its feeling and springs up in anger; and, driven insane, it can neither sleep at night nor remain anywhere by day, but, in longing, runs whenever it thinks to see the beloved; seeing him, the soul is bathed in the waters of yearning. The obstructed passages are let free, the soul has respite from its stings and relief from its pains, and this brings forth the sweetest pleasure there is. Indeed, such a man is incapable of being left alone by he who remains more beautiful than all others, but forgets his parents and siblings and all his friends, and neglects his property, caring nothing for its destruction, nor for the customs and manners in which he took pride before. Disdaining everything, he is prepared to be a slave to the one whom he desires, and to sleep anywhere it is permitted so as to be as close as possible to him: for he is in awe of the one who possesses beauty, and finds him the only healer of his greatest troubles. And people call this suffering about which I am speaking Love.
Greetings from Granville, Basse-Normandie, on whose cliffs I have been climbing and on whose plages I have been promenading for the past three days, really and truly en vacances. I felt left behind and increasingly culture-shocked in my last weeks in Paris, as the city emptied out and the real Parisians were replaced by tourists. It turns out they’ve all (or, at least some representative sample of them) wound up here, in a little town by the seaside, full not of tourists but of holiday-makers. The distinction is a fine but an important one: there are loads of little historical and cultural tidbits here, but no Mona Lisa or Notre Dame, nothing anyone’s heard of. No one is gawking at anything; there are no crowds; occasionally someone takes a picture of the view or a particularly photogenic omelette, but there’s no strobe effect of flashes. French and British tourists, with the occasional German, Netherlander, or Scandinavian thrown in, wander up and down cobblestone streets, lie out on the beach (except for during the predictable afternoon or evening downpour, at which point they all calmly seek shelter under overhangs until it passes), and eat galettes and crêpes, which seem to be the local staple. I haven’t heard a single American accent since I’ve been here—not even, since almost none of the locals speak English, while they do speak French slowly enough to be comprehensible, my own. I’m staying in a crumbling Victorian railway hotel, across the road from the station, very few of whose fixtures seem to have been updated since the original introduction of indoor plumbing. But due to a fortunate failure of the toilet in my original budget single room, I’ve been moved to a spacious ground-floor double with ensuite bath and garden view, and I’ve been splitting my time this blissful week between people-watching on the beach and sitting at the desk in my room (though in my room all I seem to do is write emails; it seems that it’s only over leisurely lunches that I’ve been able to make progress on my academic work). Really, I’m having a wonderful time, and I could see coming to a place like this every summer to rest and recuperate, just like those who, the city museum today informed me, came here 150 years ago to take the supposedly health-giving waters.
In addition to noticing the absence of American accents in Granville, I’ve noticed the absence of posh accents. Granted, I can’t tell the difference in French, but because of its proximity a lot of British tourists come here on their holidays, and all of them sound so very normal. The tone was set on the train from Paris, when I sat opposite two older English ladies—one with a working class southern accent, one with a Yorkshire accent, who I gathered both now lived in London—who spent the entire three-hour journey exchanging gossip about the marriages and deaths and shop closures in their community, and who, when I dropped my iPod under the seat, kindly tapped my shoulder and informed me in halting, half-remembered school French. All summer, I’ve been feeling guilty that I have the freedom to spend most of it abroad. Even though I’m for the most part paying my own way, even though so many young people who finish university take the time to see a little bit of the world before starting the next stage of their lives, I felt, in Paris, as if every time I met a new person and she or he asked me what I was doing there and I struggled to find a good reason that I was spending the month there, I reeked of unconscionable privilege. It’s a relief to come to the seaside and find hundreds of other people whose national cultures allow them to come to the seaside every year. It reminds me how shocked I was when I was last in Britain and I first learned that “Where are you going on your holidays this year?” was an appropriate small-talk conversation to ask of people like hairdressers or shop owners. I’d never assume that someone in that position in the US would have the opportunity to take holiday time, and it’s good to know that, for all its faults, Europe isn’t quite so class-stratified as the US.
That said, I’m still really struggling to understand my class position, especially as my departure date for Oxford inches ever closer. The last time I was in Oxford, the part of my mind that’s always whispering, “You horrible, selfish person! How can you conscience studying history in university when there are starving children in Africa? How can you conscience having nice things, being comfortable, using the electricity and the running water? How can you not be devoting every second of your life to helping those less fortunate?” started to quiet down. And I worked hard and played hard, I learned so much (about history, about myself) and had so much fun, and I laughingly called myself a champagne socialist and really meant it, because I went to garden parties and drank champagne and bitched about the Tories. And now I’m going back, and I wonder if it’s going to happen again. I fell in love with Oxford the first time, well and truly in love, and it felt so liberating to take joy in my daily work and not to hate myself. But I also stopped being an activist, stopped being committed first and foremost to raging against the machine, grew disturbingly to accept my place amongst the privileged few, and started ever more frequently to rationalize my intention to stay there: “We need hearts and minds as well as bodies, and universities are there to help the former to flourish. We need teachers who will inculcate that sense of commitment to making the world better that young people need to do the work in the trenches. Guarding the world’s knowledge is a good in itself. College communities are utopias and we need them as a visible alternative to the capitalist consensus. My happiness matters; I have as much of a right to it as anyone else to love myself and what I do.” But none of it really seems to explain why, instead of getting a job this summer, I took off for Europe; none of it seems to explain why I’m spending my money on omelettes instead of giving it to the homeless; none of it seems to explain why I deserve to make a living studying dead white men while there are other people even in my own countries who can’t afford to eat at all. I may be really excited to go back to Oxford, to start a new academic project, to live in the city that changed my life. But that doesn’t make it okay.
In the past couple weeks, the conversation about such justifications that I had with a friend on the banks of the Seine has haunted me, and in the past few days, a long discussion on my Facebook wall about the custom of “subfusc,” or academic dress, at Oxford has spiralled into a stormy argument about privilege, class inequality, and exclusion. And suddenly I once more feel guilty that I’ve been so excited to move up to a graduate’s, instead of a commoner’s, academic gown. Because just like carbon offsets don’t actually stop global warming, donating your spare income or volunteering your spare time to charity doesn’t erase the fact that you have money in the bank, a fancy scholarship letting you study a “useless” subject, all the free wine any student could possibly want, and a life generally full of material and spiritual comfort. And it’s not like I do a lot of that donating/volunteering anyway.
There are a few reasons to believe that I’m not a morally awful human being. For I do believe we’d all of us be much poorer as a civilization if there were no one among us to study and to teach the humanities. And I do believe that we all have a fundamental right to the pursuit of happiness, and that there is a place for it at the table of human interests alongside our obligation to the greater good. I believe that we can’t do the greatest good of which we are each individually capable unless we each love what we do so much that we can’t help but infect others with our joy in it; and I know that those who devote every waking hour of their day to helping others very often, unless they’re made of superhuman stuff, don’t last long, in body or in spirit, at doing it (see: the Teach for America model).
This still doesn’t help me to fall asleep easily at night; nor, unfortunately, does it give me the motivation I need, if I’m not going to be utilitarian about my life, at least to put everything I have into my academic work. These two articles are not getting written; my next thesis is not getting begun. I guess what I’m saying is that I need help: at finding a way to live a socially responsible life that keeps me inspired enough to stay motivated, despite the fact that being “inspired” about what one does is a privilege that only the most fortunate have; at finding a way to have faith that academia really can be a socially responsible vocation, even and especially when it doesn’t mean giving basic education to the most underprivileged populations; and maybe trying to find other possible life choices that make me feel as if I have a reason to keep living just as much as the life of the mind, while doing more to actually lead a good and socially useful life.
But on the other hand (isn’t there always another hand?) as I free-associate from guilt to guilt now, another thought occurs to me. One thing I’ve learned in my work is that supposed social responsibility often has its dark side, especially in historical hindsight. It’s only when we look at Victorian social reformers with fresh eyes that we can see both the transformative effects of their particular brand of progressive reformist Protestantism upon those living in urban slums in England or America, and their unintentionally devastating effects as missionaries in countries far from their own. Indeed, as any bright-eyed Ivy League grad who’s gone into development work post-graduation could probably tell you (and many have told me), it’s awfully tricky to know how you, as a rich white American, can help those of the world’s communities that are in the greatest need, or even to know how you might begin to judge which communities are. There’s an argument to be made, after all, that instilling the very wealthiest Westerners with a little kindness and human feeling might have a profoundly socially good effect in countries where the gap between rich and poor is greater and the opportunity for social mobility more limited than it has been in a very long time.
Last night, I watched Lena Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture, and unexpectedly felt a lot of sympathy for her character’s plaintive cries that, a few months post-college, she’s still “figuring it out.” Dunham’s character seems to do that in extraordinarily different ways to the ones I’ve chosen, but her desperate pleas for just a little more time really do seem like a generational thing. There is so very much wrong in the world that every problem is an urgent problem, and even people like me have cuts to humanities departments right and left to worry about. Yet I sometimes feel as if all that 22-year-old college graduates can think about is how overwhelmed they are by how unfinished they are, how ill-prepared they feel to take on the world’s problems and make their own, how wronged they feel by the adults in their lives for leaving them such a mess that they have nowhere near the right real-world skills to clean up. It’s certainly true of my friends and myself, some of whom have landed in long-term career paths but most of whom haven’t, and who a few months or a few years out of college are still having the same late-night conversations about how to spend our lives in ways that are both good and give us pleasure.
Well, in our fallen world, I don’t see a lot of people or institutions offering to help young adults figure these questions out. But I do see one, ready with its texts canonical and very much not, with its ethical questions, with its mental gymnastics, with its reserves of moral support practiced at dealing with young adults’ “quarter-life crises.” It’s the university, folks, where so many crippling ethical dilemmas are born, worked through, and hopefully made peace—but not too much peace—with. In a way, it’s a dirty job, trying to prod entitled well-to-do American kids into developing a social conscience and a sense of humanity. But someone’s got to do it, I think—otherwise the bankers keep screwing us all over, the generals keep waging war, the Lena Dunhams of this world keep making dubious choices in men instead of taking charge of their lives, and none of us is cultivating any garden at all—least of all our own.
Some excerpts from Horace Mann’s remarks upon his inauguration as president of Antioch College in 1853:
Sir, the work of education, always paramount to all others, sometimes assumes a super-added importance. Its appropriate object is youth, and its appropriate duty is to imbue them with the saving predestinations of wisdom and love. Education addresses itself specifically to the young, because the young are always ductile and mouldable; while, under our present methods of human culture, the hearts of men fossilize with a rapidity and a flintiness that have no parallel in natural petrifications.
This Western country is increasing in its wealth beyond all precedent in ancient or modern times. It has a annual lake trade of three hundred millions of dollars, and a river trade of four hundred millions, beside its immense traffic upon the Gulf; yet all this, when compared with its undeveloped resources, is only the pocket-money of a school-boy. But without the refining influences of education, wealth grows coarse in its manners, beast-like in its pleasures, vulgar and wicked in its ambitions. Without the liberalizing and uplifting power of education, wealth grows overweening in its vanity, cruel in its pride, and contemptible in its ignorance…. If a poor country needs education, because that is its only resource for changing sterility into exuberance, a rich country needs it none the less, because it is the only thing which can chasten the proud passions of man into humility, or make any other gift of God a blessing.
… such is the diffusive nature of human action that no limits can be affixed to the influences which the humblest institution, or the humblest individual, may exert. Some influences act more directly upon one department of human interests and some upon another. It is the high function of a College to act more or less upon all human interests and relations.
I completely failed to find online the text of Mann’s 1859 Baccalaureate address, in which appears his famous exhortation, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity” (if you have a source, let me know!), but the above paragraphs have been helping me over the course of the past week to rebuild from scratch the ethical principles by which I live and the reasons for which I justify pursuing the life path I do. It’s essential routine maintenance, but boy is it exhausting and emotionally draining—and I wonder if it’s really keeping me from just getting on with things and doing the work I spend so much time wondering whether I should be doing.
The first thing I noticed on Thursday, when I woke up in my childhood bedroom for the first time in two years, is how quiet everything is. There’s not much wildlife, no people walking past outside, no churchbells or sirens. It seems as if there’s only one ambient noise at a time. Every once in a while, a single car will drive past, or a single child will shout, or a single lawn mower will rev its engine, but then everything lapses into silence again. “Culture shock” is the only way to describe how I’m coping with returning to the place where I lived for nine years: it’s been a long time since I spent my days under the capacious, cloudless blue dome of the southern California sky, drove 80 miles an hour down the freeway, sat on a sun-drenched concrete terrace at the UCSD student center and slurped at a bowl of Japanese noodles, or even taken an elevator seven floors up instead of walked three floors down to find some books to read under Library of Congress catalogue number PR. It’s nice to see my family, nice to be on vacation, nice to have good weather. But cleaning out the piles of paper that pack my childhood bedroom hurts—to have to go back in time again, to high school, as if the past four years hadn’t happened—and as always when I go west, I feel profoundly and suddenly cut off from the close relationships one forms when one lives on a college campus and eats meals with the same people every day. And this time, it’s not just for the summer—it’s for good.
For the last few weeks before I left Princeton, I told my friends I was feeling remarkably “zen” about the end. Unlike in previous years, when I’d been stressed and depressed about going away, and irrationally afraid that I would lose touch with the people about whom I care, this year I felt primed to deal with impermanence. I was sick of Princeton, for one thing, and ready for a break; for another, I knew that at the end of June I would be diving into a European adventure with some of my closest friends; for a third, Oxford in September is a known quantity, full of its own wonderful people and new academic horizons. To be sure, it hurt a bit to pack up the co-op’s pots and pans; I felt at loose ends as people slowly started to trickle away. But in the last few days, I calmly said my goodbyes. I gave hugs. I made sure to track everyone down. I saw old friends who came back to town for alumni reunions, and felt as if not much had changed in my relationships with them. My family came to town, helped me to finish packing my life into boxes, and cheered me resolutely through three days of awards presentations and academic processionals. By day I donned academic regalia and sat and stood through solemn ceremonies; by night I sat on the floor in empty dorm rooms or went out and danced; I spent the weekend a bit buzzed on too much sparkling wine and forgot to hurt—that is, until the very end.
On Tuesday morning at 10:30am, 2,067 degree candidates processed onto the front lawn of Princeton’s campus, and despite the ludicrousness of the situation, despite the incongruity of a wind ensemble from Philadelphia playing the classics of the British festival band repertoire, I cried. I cried when it became clear that, after weeks of worrying, the weather was going to miraculously hold off to make it through the ceremony; I cried when the University president pronounced, “Auctoritate mihi a curatoribus Universitatis Princetoniensis commissa, vos ad gradum primum in artibus et cum honoribus, ut indicatum est, admitto”; and I cried at her Commencement address—one of the better defenses of a liberal arts education I’ve heard of late, and it’s my business to keep an eye out for defenses of a liberal arts education. It concluded, in part, thusly:
What I am saying is that to be successful in the 21st century, just as in the 18th century, a society requires citizens who are steeped in history, literature, languages, culture, and scientific and technological ideas from ancient times to the present day. They need to be curious about the world, broadly well-informed, independent of mind, and able to understand and sympathize with what Woodrow Wilson referred to as “the other.” Our colleges and universities need scholars who have dedicated themselves to the life of the mind, to preserving the wisdom of the ages, to generating new knowledge and a deeper understanding of the past, and to passing that knowledge and understanding on to the next generation.
Here, President Tilghman points to something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: the two senses of time that operate simultaneously in any modern university, but particularly a university like Princeton that relies for its continued success upon strong and lasting alumni relationships. There are the beneficiaries of liberal arts educations who use them as stepping-stones to other things: to lives of public service or to wealth accrual or both; to starting businesses or starting wars; to making peace or making families; to inventing new technologies and curing cancer. In the crass terms of Annual Giving, getting those people back to Reunions every year through the appeal of orange-and-black debauchery keeps investment (at the bottom line, of the financial sort) flowing into the university’s twin projects of teaching and research. In my own terms, skeptical of market logic and the rule of capital, there are many ways more than money to do good in the world, and when done right a liberal arts education can instill young people with a sense of civic responsibility they can impart in some way to their chosen life path, always remembering that the universities that set them on that path continue to require their ideological, if not their financial support. At any rate, this is one side of university time: a series of comings and goings seen from the individual perspective, in which the student graduates and then moves on, a little wiser and richer, save only—in the case of somewhere like Princeton—returning once in a while to renew the connection. In this sense of time, university is something that happens between the ages of 18 and 22, and then there’s “real life.”
But there’s another sense of university time, and it’s the one Tilghman comes to at the very end of the paragraph I quoted. Each of us who goes to university only graduates once. But every year, those whose lives are spent in having new ideas and preserving the world’s old ones pass them on to the young people who move fleetingly through their lives. (As Andrew Delbanco writes in his recent book about College, “One of the peculiarities of the teaching life is that every year the teacher gets older while the students stay the same age.”) Every year, a professor at a place like Princeton says hello to dozens of new students and goodbye to dozens more, not to mention salutations and valedictories to colleagues and staff members and their families whose careers take them from campus to campus. For those who stay behind, I imagine, June is full of saying goodbye to people you will in all likelihood never see again, as well as to people you in all likelihood will—you just don’t know on what campus, in what country, in what year, in what guise. And I suspect, furthermore, that the observers of each sense of university time don’t fully understand the other’s sense: to the faculty and staff, alumni’s eagerness to parodically relive their college days must seem ludicrous; too rarely, on the other hand, do alumni stop to think about the full weight of what the faculty and staff do to keep an institution of higher learning operational and emotionally alive. But to observants of neither sense do the precise codes that sense prescribes for saying goodbye make saying goodbye any easier to bear.
I’m expostulating all this half-baked theory because I’m beginning to think that some of the reason a sense of severance and loneliness crept up on me when I made it out west to my parents’ home is that I don’t quite know into which category I belong. For years, I have made periods of loneliness, at Princeton or away, easier to bear by reminding myself that the university is my home and it will always be there for me. There is no leap into the unknown, no discontinuity; I’ll be returning in September to friends, mentors, and colleagues I know and to projects with which I’m familiar. I trust in the knowledge that academia is a small world, and that people from one’s previous postings have an uncanny habit of popping up when one least expects it (especially in Oxford). I’m also in the privileged position of being able to travel to see friends who are staying in the US, and/or who haven’t chosen academic paths—the only hurdle is the leap of faith it takes paranoid, shy me to trust that when I send an email out into the void, my friends miss me as much as I miss them, and will answer. Heretofore, for the most part, they’ve tended to.
And yet. On Tuesday night at 2am, diploma in hand and packing all but done, I sat down on the window seat in my empty room with one of my closest friends and we solemnly marked it as the end of an era. We’d got to know each other this year, quite by a series of chances, and a friendship flowered of the type that the novels tell me flowers when you study, read and write, eat and drink, laugh and play together, when you are young and your heart is open to connecting with others. We’ll see each other this summer. We’ll see each other next year. We’ll call and write. But we said goodbye so poignantly because we knew that, with me leaving Princeton, it wouldn’t be quite the same. That romantic openness of undergraduate days—when you can take a class in any discipline and you never know what new ideas will be stirred within you—that allowed this friendship to flourish isn’t going to come round again. When I return to the city of dreaming spires—the place where I first knew what love was, a lightness of spirit I brought back to Princeton for this final year—things will be a little more circumscribed by my professional aspirations, by the slow shift from student into scholar, from one sense of time to another. (As an aside, given that time is a river, and given that one of the last things that I did as an undergraduate was go mess about in a rowboat, I wonder what is to be made of the fact that Jerome K. Jerome’s three men, striped blazers and guitar and dog and all, spend 150-odd pages struggling resolutely upstream.)
There are still so many unanswered questions, still so many places I haven’t been and so many languages I don’t know, still so many ways my heart might yet grow larger and my soul wiser. But out here on the other side of the world (or so it seems), it is near-overwhelming to look at the walls of this old bedroom and think how much has happened inside me since I first put these posters up. And it hurts so much to think that everything that happened is now past, and that—as any Victorian or Edwardian worth their salt could have told you—youth fades, and then we have to get on as best we can with finding another sense of time, one that’s as much focused on doing good in the world as it is on our own self-development.
References:
Bloom, “Eros,” in The Closing of the American Mind, 132-137
Davies, The Rebel Angels, 65, 187, 257
Collini, What Are Universities For?
Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, 9
Nabokov, “The University Poem”
Forster, The Longest Journey
From Adam Phillips, “Promises, Promises,” in his essay collection of the same name:
If we talk about promises now, as I think we should when we talk about psychoanalysis and literature, then we are talking about hopes and wishes, about what we are wanting from our relationship with these two objects in the cultural field. It is a question of relationships, but perhaps it also points to the drawback of making ‘relationships’ the primary category. I think we should make our primary category something like moral aims, or preferred worlds, what Stanley Cavell refers to… after Emerson, as ‘moral perfectionism’, which he defines as ‘some idea of being true to oneself’, but which ‘happily consents to democracy’. Our description of our relationships—which entails our description of what it is not to have one, what a good one is, and so on—depends on our moral aims, on the kind of selves and worlds we are consciously and unconsciously committed to fashioning. There can be no democracy without the notion of relationship as somehow central, but the idea of being true to oneself may involve redescribing the idea of relationship so radically that it may sometimes be barely recognizable…. Democracy thrives by valuing rival and complementary interpretation. It is not equally clear what being true to oneself thrives by, or whether it could ever be subject to generalization or, indeed, formulation. Our relationship to ourselves must be inextricable from our relationship with others; but in what sense does one have a ‘relationship’ with oneself, or with a book, or with its author, or with a tradition? In other words, is there sufficient resemblance between these objects to make ‘relationship’ the right, or rather the illuminating, word?
What we actually do—or find ourselves doing—in the presence of a book or an analyst could not be more different, from one point of view. The implication of Literature and Psychoanalysis is that we must be using them for distinguishably different things. But how we use them depends on what I am calling here our ‘moral aims’, our conscious and unconscious moral projects about whose very consequences we can have so little knowledge. What or who we seek to be influenced by—to be changed by—depends on the kinds of selves (and worlds) we want to make and the kinds of culture in which we happen to live.
I have a sense that Phillips here is making a rather Forsterian point, and I think a line of Forster’s speaks to some of his rhetorical questions: “The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”
I first read that line right at the beginning of this academic year, just before I discovered Forster proper and started on this year’s emotional, intellectual, and ethical course, defined by personal relationships, books, and—yes—psychoanalysis. It seems, too, a fitting way to end—and today, after much writer’s block, I started finally to find the words to talk about what it means to end one era, and to allow another to begin. Here comes summer, and with it a lot of processing.
On Friday, I will be attending my first real academic conference—and giving my first talk—ever! It’s at the Ohio State University this Friday and Saturday, and it’s called Queer Places, Practices, and Lives: A Symposium in Honor of Samuel Steward. Samuel Steward was a fascinating person and an OSU grad, who was at the center of gay identity formation in mid-20th-century America in a way analogous to how Symonds was at the center of homosexual/Uranian identity formation in 1870s-90s Britain. The conference features a bevy of panels and plenaries on all sorts of aspects of queer identity construction in history and in the present, in addition to attendant methodological questions about discovering and preserving queer histories.
I’ll be speaking at 9am on Friday on a very cool panel that will be taking a variety of disciplinary perspectives to queer masculinities. I’ll be talking about Symonds’ life and work in relation to methodological issues that arise at the intersection of the history of sexuality/queerness and intellectual (and other forms of) history, and I hope that it’s going to be a lively conversation. Should you, dear reader, by any chance happen to be in the area, I’d love to see you there!
Finishing undergrad is a strange, special, and difficult time, about which I hope I’ll have the energy and the inspiration to write in the couple weeks (!) between now and graduation. But until then, it’s time to sit my last exam, and then fly to Ohio.
I read so much, in my scholarly life, about young people whose minds were broadened and whose lives were changed and whose souls took wings when they spent three or four years within quads and cloisters. It is strange to think that my time as an undergraduate is nearly at a close, and conceptually difficult to wrap my head round as well: after all, my career in quads and cloisters is far from over, yet this special time of golden youth that the poets elegize won’t come round again, and I can’t help wondering if I’ve made the best use of it. I go up and down, day by day: today the weather is beautiful and the leaves are spreading out over the great trees that ring the quad, and I am sitting on my window seat and feeling grateful. My father is visiting me today, and I’ve been able to introduce him to many friends and mentors (and give him a bound copy of my thesis) and feel proud of how many connections I’ve made, how much good work I’ve done, these past few years. Other days maybe the weather isn’t so nice, and I struggle to be the best friend and the best scholar and the most open-hearted person I can be, and I sink into dark moods and wonder whether it was all worth it. But today, happily, I feel rather balanced, rather at peace, sad to put my life in boxes again in a few weeks, but ready nevertheless, excited to travel in continental Europe this summer and then to move to Britain come autumn.
The University sent we seniors a long and detailed survey about our lives these past four years, and told us that we can’t collect our caps and gowns and other graduation accoutrements unless we complete it. I also heard a rumor that our responses are actually read, so I took some time and some honesty with the final, free-response questions. I wanted to share some excerpts, because I want to illustrate how it’s possible to leave this rather strange place a little bit bitter but still profoundly grateful—how possible it is to be extremely ambivalent about Princeton and to value it while simultaneously being skeptical about some of its most visible aspects. When that column about Annual Giving that I wrote for the Daily Princetonian attracted so much vitriol a couple months back, I was disappointed to see how little space there is here for a discourse of nuance and complexity surrounding students’ and alumni’s relationships to their alma mater. When I wrote my comments on this survey, I wanted to give balance and ambivalence another go:
I have not necessarily found it easy, over the past four years, to find a “home” at Princeton. Too often, in my experience, the attempts to artificially inculcate community through university or residential-college team spirit, and the overwhelming attitude of orange-and-black exceptionalism that dogs eating-club culture, overshadow what is truly remarkable about forming connections and community with other people here. I have flourished through close friendships and mentoring relationships with faculty and grad students, and found a few close friends my own age. I feel at home here when I’m sitting on a university policy committee, talking to faculty at a reception after an academic talk, in a meeting with my thesis advisor, or lingering after dinner at my co-op, talking about ideas or just complaining about my day. But all this community has come at the expense of a powerful sense of exclusion from “mainstream” Princeton. It has been years since I attended a major undergraduate event like Lawnparties; I don’t feel as if I belong at even the undergraduate events that attempt to be most inclusive, like this fall’s Orange and Black Ball. Princeton has given me the opportunity to achieve academically beyond my wildest dreams, but I have a lingering sense of regret that I haven’t been able to have a normal undergraduate experience because I feel like such a cultural misfit.
Yet, over the past four years, I have grown from a child into an adult, and from a student into a scholar. Thanks to intellectual and moral support from my academic mentors, I began to see myself as someone capable of carrying out large-scale research and of making innovative intellectual discoveries, and then I actually did that, writing an original and smart senior thesis into which I poured my soul and my intellect and of which I’m extremely proud. Princeton helped me logistically to write that thesis: through preparation from my writing seminar to my departmental independent work; through extremely good academic advising (my thesis advisor is truly a gentleman and a scholar); through financial support that enabled me to do copious research overseas and (in a few weeks) to present my research at a conference alongside senior faculty; through the provision of a life-changing opportunity to study abroad at the same university that my research subject attended. But as important to the process were the books I’ve read in my classes and in my spare time, the conversations I’ve had, and the interpersonal connections I’ve made that have helped me to bring a truly humane element to my scholarship. In all honesty, I’ve spent more of my time here frustrated that the opportunities for those conversations and connections aren’t thicker on the ground than I have spent inspired by the ones that have materialized. Yet I’ve learned that this is a place where academic drive and ambition make all kinds of remarkable conversations and connections possible. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be able to grow out of Princeton and out of being an undergraduate, and I wouldn’t feel emotionally and intellectually capable of moving to another country and beginning graduate school next year.
On another note, I’m a member of the 2 Dickinson St. Co-op, and I think it’s worth emphasizing to my reader how special that place is, and how unlike any other part of Princeton. It’s an organic community (the fruits and vegetables, literally!), in which each participant has a stake and commitment, and it’s a building in which one always feels at home. Our membership is the most diverse of any organization I’ve been involved in, from freshmen to post-docs and everyone between, including students who have taken time off or otherwise have a broader diversity of life experiences than your average, say, eating club. We cook tremendous food, we are moderate and mature social drinkers, we have talent shows and go on hikes, we sit outside in the hammocks on our porch and read for pleasure. Some of our members who aren’t in grad school already are grad-school-bound, but those who aren’t are equally intellectually curious, invested in their coursework and independent work and in the idea of a collegial academic community such as is extremely rare among undergraduates here.
This is all to say that I know that the administration are interested in learning how to build more close-knit and intellectually and socially stimulating communities here, and have struggled with how to encourage the ones that are healthy and discourage the ones that aren’t. 2D is a community that I think those who make decisions at this university often forget about–and while perhaps that’s one reason that we’ve flourished so organically and autonomously for decades (learning to manage our own efficient and successful financing and accounting system, for instance), it seems to me that the University may well want to take an interest in what we’re doing and how well we’re doing it. 2D and the other co-ops could be models for how to build communities elsewhere on campus that are truly student-driven, self-sustaining, and socially healthy.
And now I’m off to read and write, to socialize, to think and feel, to see if I can squeeze in any more soul-growing in these last few weeks—after all, golden youth doesn’t end until the fifth of June!
I wrote my first book in the summer of 1994. I was four. It was before my mother had a computer at home, and we sat together in her study in the basement of our house in Atlanta, in front of the electric typewriter on which she’d written her dissertation. I dictated; she touch-typed. The book is called “Emily’s Book.” It has four chapters: about the human body, the solar system, tap-dancing, and the movie Aladdin. It is bound in blue cardboard, with a hand-illustrated cover. It includes such priceless gems as “It is great to have a body. I like everyone’s body,” and “The Milky Way is a vast group of stars. I don’t know so much about stars.” I wrote about what was important in my four-year-old world. I wrote about what I thought and felt. I constructed a self I could publish to the world, one who wanted to be a doctor or an astronomer, who liked “A Whole New World” but not the Cave of Wonders, and who, by virtue of omission, didn’t come home from school every day in tears.
All my life, I have written stories about myself. When I was a child, they were often false, either unconscious lies—like the time that I convinced my first-grade classmates as well as myself that I was born in Scotland—or old-fashioned fiction, like when I wrote myself into the leading role of school stories that turned classrooms that were sites of trauma into places of camaraderie and adventure. In my efforts of self-fashioning, I became a pirate, a musketeer, a posh public-school boy out of some mid-twentieth-century British novel that I was probably too young to read.
When I was a teenager, I finally got the picture that trying to be those things didn’t make me cool and glamorous. It just made me—as I was known in seventh grade—”the smart girl who wears the weird clothes.” It got me intellectual authority, but it didn’t get me friendships, or relationships. Maybe that’s why, in high school, I started to interrogate who I really am, and what I have to give to the real world. Instead of writing about “swords, ships, and Scotland”—for so I named my “obsessions” when I was twelve—I wrote about what it was like to be the sole conscientious objector in a knights-and-armor-themed summer camp, about how I felt when my high-school boyfriend would say to me, “You’re such a guy!” and about how much the poetry of Allen Ginsberg meant to me.
These became my college application essays, and what primarily seemed significant about them was that they were the only thing that I could point to that justified my acceptance to Princeton—which, for a few years, I was extremely preoccupied with justifying. The road to ending that preoccupation began, in fact, in the spring of my freshman year, when I started a blog. I still write that blog, and I know some of you read it. I do two things on my blog, and have since the beginning of freshman spring: I post quotes from my reading that speak to me, and sometimes brief responses to them; and I post longer personal essays about my thoughts, desires, and aspirations that help me to envision myself as an academic in control of my life. This year, for instance, I’ve written about my experiences studying at Oxford and then doing thesis research in England in the summer; about my increasingly complicated relationship to LGBT identities and politics; about spirituality; about the books I love and why I love them; and of course (quelle surprise!) about John Addington Symonds.
I promised my mother I would make this particular essay be as little about Symonds as possible, but I think I’m going to have to mention him. You see, in thinking about the craft of self-fashioning and life-story-writing, I’ve gotten a bit closer to understanding what it is that draws me to Symonds and the other men “of the Greek persuasion” I study. There’s a thin but very powerful strand running through modern intellectual and literary history that I like to call “the homoerotic literary tradition.” It involves well-to-do, highly educated men in Europe and North America who discover that there is something fundamentally different about how they connect with other people: not by desiring a school classmate or having paying sex with a soldier, but by reading about desire and love. They use their reading—of Plato and other Greeks, of Walt Whitman, of Michelangelo and maybe Shakespeare—and their knowledge of the lives and life-works of people whom we now consider part of the gay canon, like Oscar Wilde or Christopher Isherwood—to make sense of who they are and what they want. What brings me back to Symonds is that he, like many other, later men, wrote his own life story in the form of a long manuscript of his memoirs, and moreover that he wrote it as a narrative of self-discovery through the lens of reading and writing first, and life experiences second. It was 1889, though, and like E.M. Forster’s 1914 homosexual novel Maurice, Symonds’ Memoirs couldn’t be published until long after his death.
Maurice is about as fictionalized as Symonds’ Memoirs are true, which is to say not entirely. Both, in effect, are ways of advancing an idea of who a homosexual man is and what it’s like inside his head. Because Symonds and Forster both saw themselves—to a certain extent—as homosexual men, the Memoirs and Maurice are both ways of saying, “Here is my message to the world about what I feel and desire and about how to understand people like me.”
People often ask me why I study literary gay men, and it’s a question I find very difficult to answer. As I’ve grown up, I’ve ceased to ally myself with identity politics based in nonnormative sexual identity, and yet my attachment to what people like Symonds and Forster do as readers and writers has grown stronger than ever. So I don’t just do this to be a liberationist, to “uncover the gay past.” Of course, there’s the fairly obvious point that my study of sex and sexuality stems from the sublimation of my repressed sexual desires. Now, that may explain why when I was a teenager I’d read all of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s seminal sexological text Psychopathia Sexualis before I’d ever seen so much as a frame of pornography. But at the risk of disappointing the Freudians among you, I don’t think repression is the whole story about the homoerotic literary tradition and me. Both the identity politics and the repression theories risk reducing the HLT to sex, and to a fairly specific set of sex acts and sexual identities at that. I’ve realized recently that a literary tradition that proposes to think seriously, and beautifully, about who we are and what we want has a broad ability to move people coming from all kinds of different places with respect to loving and connecting.
One of the reasons I realized this is that over the winter break, I read Forster’s novel Howards End. The way I read it, the book is about how we fall in love, and the kinds of connections (that’s his word) that we form: family-love, sex-love, friendship-love, and even place-love. Forster shows us all these kinds of connections in all their complexities. Not every attempted connection comes to an entirely happy ending. There is tragedy in Howards End. And there is quotidian compromise and unfulfillment, which is in some ways far worse. Yet, Forster gives us to understand, we are far, far better off for having made connections at all, regardless of their eventual outcome. He voices this thought in the words of one of the novel’s protagonists, at its conclusion:
It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them…. And others—others go further still, and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don’t you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily gray.
The notes in the Penguin edition of Howards End say, “with the hindsight given by Maurice, it is hard to help seeing [this] speech as a concealed plea for charity towards homosexuals.” But I don’t read it like that at all. I do think that it matters that Forster was preoccupied throughout his life with understanding his own sexual identity, and I certainly think that he wrote with care and emotion about being a homosexual man who started to understand himself through books and only then moved on to life experiences. I also think that it matters that there were things in 1910 that Forster couldn’t say in print, because there are things that we all—however confessional our styles—are scared to tell the world.
But what makes Forster one of my favorite writers is that the bit I just quoted comes out of the mouth of Margaret Schlegel: a woman, who marries a man, and altogether is a very different person who makes very different romantic choices to those that Forster himself made. I find it extraordinary that out of writing about one life—which he did prolifically, in fiction but also in a series of famous diaries and journals—Forster came to write about all our lives, about the imperative that we all “Only connect!”
It’s a tall order comparing oneself to Forster. But I write essays these days because I, too, hope that out of my one life someone else who reads or listens to what I have to say will take something of value. And I also write essays for the same reasons that I wrote a book when I was four. That I care so much about all the wonderful things in the world that I can’t keep my words to myself; and also that I am still trying to find ways of explaining myself and my peculiarities. I am given to understand that such voyages of self-discovery last a lifetime: Symonds wrote his Memoirs four years before he died, and even then—an attentive historian will note!—they are far from accurate or comprehensive. But I also believe that I owe it to myself, to Symonds, to Forster, and to all who have ever found themselves through reading and writing, to keep sailing: onwards, and upwards, and better.
Samuel Rutherford 
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